The 21st century has presented us with a new and different environment in which we must all work and live. Privacy and security are paramount concerns for individuals, corporations and governments alike. Unfortunately, our increased desire for security is being currently being satisfied at the expense of privacy. Some of the most Draconian changes in law and public policy ever considered threaten to change the face our free and democratic society. Local police and federal authorities have had the definition of ‘probable cause’ extended to such a degree that obtaining a search warrant will soon be as easy and quick as using an ATM. Airports will soon have the right to check your background history when you purchase a ticket. Corporations and governments, besieged by hackers and espionage agents are also looking for solutions, including workplace policies of reading employee email (including personnel addresses), drug testing, personality profiling, in-office searches, video cameras, etc.
The Federal government has recently enacted Carnivore (recently given a less frightening name due to negative public reaction), which is capable of analyzing tens of millions of email messages every day; the equivalent of a wire tap for messaging but using a shotgun approach. Our free society is struggling with the conflict between security and individual privacy, and privacy is losing. However, just as technology can be used to decrease privacy it can be used to regain it, which is the objective of several current available products as well as the device detailed hereinbelow.
Recent trends in criminal prosecution involving digital evidence and the desire for consumers to better protect their privacy and personnel data, have given rise to a number of new technology products. Thus far, these products have been grouped into two classes, disk sanitizers and encryption systems.
Disk-sanitizers, among other actions, permanently delete “deleted” files. This bizarre nomenclature is the result of two facets of hard disk use. The first facet results from the desire, on the part of consumers, to have file systems that were “idiot-proof”. To meet this requirement, operating systems were modified so that the act of “deleting” a file merely moves the file to a “trash can”. If the user realizes they have made a mistake they can access the trashcan to restore the file. Thus the original file was never really deleted in the first place.
The second facet resulting in the bizarre nomenclature is that even “deleted” files are easily recovered unless the space they occupied is overwritten by some other data. This is what sanitizers do; they make sure that trashcan copies are prevented, and that the space used by the file is overwritten by junk data. Even after a sanitizer is used, however, recovering files is still possible using sophisticated tools that read the areas between distinct storage areas, and can reconstruct files using these “shadow writes”. In fact, there currently exists and entire industry subsection devotes to the recovery of data, commonly referred to as “forensic data recovery”.
Therefore, there is a need for chemicals that can permanently destroy data from magnetic data storage media and other data storage media such that the data is not forensically recoverable. The present invention is directed toward this need.
It is important to note that the present invention is not intended to be limited to a system or method which must satisfy one or more of any stated objects or features of the invention. It is also important to note that the present invention is not limited to the preferred, exemplary, or primary embodiment(s) described herein. Modifications and substitutions by one of ordinary skill in the art are considered to be within the scope of the present invention, which is not to be limited except by the following claims.